You should have seen the one that got away!

RIVER MONSTERS BY JEREMY WADE (Swordfish £18.99)

Maybe it’s because we all live such sedentary lives now, sitting at desks, staring at screens. But many of us are fascinated with the lives of adventurers and mavericks like Jeremy Wade, people who go out there and do daft things just because they want to. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, read about it.

Wade, it turns out, is a TV presenter in his spare time, on one of those channels way down the line that you only watch late at night when all other options have been exhausted.

But never mind. TV is just a job. What actually drives him is an obsession with fish - and in particular, huge scary fish. River monsters are his lifeblood. Sheer curiosity - and, one would imagine, a certain restlessness - compel him to seek them out, catch them if he can, and ideally be photographed with them for posterity.

It all started when he was eight or nine, when he caught his first fish in the River Stour in Kent. Even then, it seems, he was not like other boys. ‘The river ran through the village where I grew up, and beyond its mirrored surface I discovered a secret world, populated with mysterious inhabitants that few people saw.’

Fishing can do this to people. All that sitting doing nothing for hours suits men of a reflective temperament, and Wade is certainly one of those.

‘Casting a line into the water is like asking a question. Something could be right underneath you, but you can’t see it - it’s there but it’s not there. And sometimes only a line will make it real.’ And I thought they were all thinking about which sandwich to eat next.

His book, though, is only inadvertently a meditation on the nature of fishing and the inner lives of those who fish. On a more action-packed level, it is also full of stories of fish-chasing derring-do.

Where it all started: The river Stour in Kent

Wade loves ‘the murky world of fishermen’s tales. Fish that swallow men whole, others that eat them from within, and others that pack a killer punch’.

When he was 25 he read an article about a fish in India, the mahseer, ‘a giant golden-scaled carp that lives in thunderous rocky rivers’. And that was it: decision made.

‘I dusted down a couple of rods, packed them inside a length of drainpipe, and boarded an Ariana Afghan DC10 to Delhi. I had just £200 concealed under my clothes and scarcely a clue as to how I was going to survive the next three months.’

Thirty years on, Jezzer, as everyone seems to call him, has become a leading exponent of what one might call Extreme Angling. In Thailand, his hunt for the Mekong giant catfish got him arrested for spying.

Three times he ventured into the Congo rainforest in search of the goliath tigerfish, which ‘bites pieces out of anything that comes its way . . . One favourite snack is the dangling genitals of passing male swimmers’.

Then in 1993 he made his first trip to the Amazon, on the trail of the arapaima, an air-breathing super-predator that can grow up to 15ft long. ‘The rod creaks in pain, its Kevlar and carbon-fibre sinews surely about to transform into splinters.’

Along the way, he has managed to turn his passion into a career. Now TV cameras accompany him on these quests. This slightly undermines the book’s narrative drive. It’s one thing to land an enormous fish purely for the challenge of it, or because no one has done it before, but it’s quite another to do it because you are making a documentary about it and need the footage.

It reminds me a little of those books by writers on silly quests, which they have undertaken purely so they can write books about them at the end. There is a faint air of unreality about it all.

But other men’s obsessions are always good value, and Wade, now grizzled and weatherbeaten, has clearly dedicated his life to his. Increasingly, you sense, he is very much at one with the fish.

His eyes, he says, ‘begin to enhance detail and eliminate noise, to sharpen edges and slow down time’, so that he can determine not just the species of the fish he is pursuing ‘but also the size and direction of travel’.

Gradually, the distinctions between hunter and hunted begin to blur. If he starts to grow gills, I doubt anyone will be remotely surprised.

River Monsters is on ITV1 at 7.30pm every Tuesday from 3 January to 14 February 2012, repeated on ITV4 at 9pm every Wednesday from 4 January. It will be screened on Discovery UK later in the year.

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You should have seen the one that got away!: RIVER MONSTERS BY JEREMY WADE